The Psychology of the Upset: What Happens When Good Teams Start Falling Apart?

By Dr. Brandy Runyan, PhD, Sport Leadership*

Texas quarterback Arch Manning (16) during a college football game between Tennessee and Texas at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, Tenn. on Sept. 26, 2026. Credit: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect (Reuters)

If you watched college football this weekend, you probably found yourself asking the same question a lot of us were asking. How does a team with that much talent manage to lose a game it was supposed to win?

It's a fair question, and I think we sometimes make the answer more complicated than it needs to be. Sometimes teams just get outplayed. Sometimes coaches make bad decisions. Sometimes a few mistakes at the wrong time change the entire direction of a game.

But there's another part of this that I've always found interesting, particularly from a sport psychology standpoint. What happens to athletes when they realize things aren't going the way they expected?

I've worked in professional football representation for nearly twenty years, and I've seen plenty of talented athletes struggle with things that had very little to do with their physical abilities. It's one of the reasons I've become so interested in mental resilience and the psychological side of athletic performance.

We talk about talent constantly in sports. We rank it, recruit it, measure it, and spend an extraordinary amount of money trying to develop it. But talent doesn't necessarily tell us much about how someone will respond when things start going wrong.

And in football, things can go wrong pretty quickly.

There's a Different Kind of Pressure When You're Supposed to Win

Think about the difference between playing a team everyone expects you to beat and playing a team everyone expects to beat you.

When you're the underdog, you have something to prove. You can take some chances. You might even play a little more freely because nobody expects much from you in the first place.

But when you're the favorite, especially a nationally ranked favorite, the expectations are completely different.

Now you're supposed to win. And if you're not winning, everybody wants to know why.

I don't think we talk enough about what that does to athletes psychologically.

There's quite a bit of research on the relationship between anxiety and athletic performance. One area that interests me is what happens when athletes become overly conscious of skills they've spent years developing.

Think about a quarterback who's made the same throw thousands of times. Under normal circumstances, he sees the coverage, makes his read, and delivers the football. But when the pressure builds, some athletes begin thinking too much about the mechanics or consequences of what they're doing.

Instead of trusting the skill, they're trying to control every part of it.

That doesn't happen to everybody, of course. Some athletes perform exceptionally well under pressure. But it's a real phenomenon, and it's one of the reasons I don't automatically assume that the most talented team is also the most mentally prepared team.

Those are two different things.

Confidence Is a Funny Thing

I think confidence is one of the most misunderstood qualities in sports.

We tend to treat it as something an athlete either has or doesn't have. In reality, confidence can change depending on the situation, the opponent, recent performance, and even what's happening within the team.

I've also noticed that we sometimes confuse confidence with reputation.

A team can be ranked in the top five nationally, have an outstanding recruiting class, and return a roster full of experienced players. All of that matters, but none of it guarantees that the team will execute well on Saturday.

And I wonder how often success itself becomes part of the problem.

When you're accustomed to winning, how do you respond when someone punches you in the mouth, figuratively speaking, and doesn't back down?

Do you trust your preparation? Do you make adjustments? Or do you start pressing because you're suddenly worried about losing a game everyone assumed you'd win?

I don't think there's one answer. Every team has its own personalities, leadership structure, and culture.

But I do think those questions are worth asking, especially when we're evaluating programs that consistently recruit elite talent but struggle in unexpected situations.

One Mistake Can Turn Into a Really Bad Afternoon

Something else I've always paid attention to is how athletes respond immediately after making a mistake.

Not necessarily the mistake itself. Everybody makes those.

I'm interested in what happens on the next play.

Does the quarterback who just threw an interception come back and make a good decision? Does the defensive back who got beaten deep settle down and play his assignment? Or does the frustration from one play start affecting everything that follows?

There's a psychological component to that, and it's something coaches should be addressing long before game day.

Emotional regulation is a significant part of athletic performance. Athletes don't need to be emotionless, and frankly, I wouldn't want them to be. Emotion is part of what makes sports competitive.

But there's a difference between experiencing frustration and allowing frustration to control your decision-making.

And when you're dealing with a team sport, that becomes even more complicated because one person's emotional response can affect other people.

A quarterback gets frustrated with his offensive line. A receiver starts showing his frustration because he isn't getting the ball. Defensive players become irritated because the offense keeps going three-and-out.

Before you know it, the problems aren't limited to missed assignments or poor execution. Now you've got communication issues, frustration between teammates, and people trying to do too much.

I've always believed you learn a lot more about a team's culture when it's losing than when it's winning.

It's easy to talk about being a family when everybody's happy.

It's a different story when you're down two touchdowns in the fourth quarter.

What Are We Actually Teaching Athletes About Failure?

This is probably the part of the conversation I care about most.

We invest so much time and money in developing athletes physically, and rightfully so. But I sometimes wonder whether we're doing nearly enough to prepare them for the psychological realities of competition.

Especially now.

College athletes are dealing with things that previous generations didn't experience in quite the same way. NIL opportunities, transfer portal decisions, constant media coverage, social media criticism, and an enormous amount of public attention.

Imagine being nineteen years old, having a terrible game on national television, and then opening your phone to thousands of strangers telling you that you're worthless.

And we're surprised when athletes struggle with confidence?

I don't believe mental resilience means teaching someone to ignore everything, suppress their emotions, or pretend that criticism doesn't bother them.

That's not how people work.

Mental resilience involves learning how to manage difficult experiences without allowing them to completely derail your ability to function, compete, and move forward.

It also means understanding that your value as a person isn't determined by a stat sheet.

That's something I think gets lost in the way we talk about athletes, particularly when they're young.

We celebrate them when they win, criticize them when they lose, and sometimes forget that they're still developing as people.

Coaches Have a Responsibility Here, Too

I don't think we can have a serious conversation about mental resilience without talking about coaching and leadership.

Coaches establish the environment in which athletes are expected to perform. They influence how mistakes are handled, how players communicate, and whether athletes feel comfortable acknowledging when something isn't working.

That doesn't mean lowering expectations or avoiding accountability.

It means understanding that constantly embarrassing an athlete for making mistakes isn't necessarily going to produce better performance.

Sometimes it produces an athlete who's afraid to make another one.

And there's research supporting the importance of psychological safety, trust, and effective communication within teams.

I think coaches need to pay closer attention to what happens on their sidelines when things aren't going well.

Who's communicating? Who's encouraging teammates? Who's taking responsibility? Who's making the situation worse?

Those behaviors can tell you quite a bit about the culture you've created.

And you can't fix all of that with a halftime speech.

Maybe We're Asking the Wrong Question

When a highly ranked team loses to an opponent it was expected to beat, the conversation usually centers on who deserves the blame.

Was the quarterback overrated? Did the coaching staff get outsmarted? Were the rankings wrong?

Sometimes those are legitimate questions.

But I'd be more interested in knowing how that team responds during the following week.

Do the players take responsibility without turning on one another? Does the coaching staff make meaningful adjustments? Can the team regain its confidence without pretending the loss never happened?

That's where I think mental resilience becomes more than something we put on a motivational poster.

It's something that has to show up in actual behavior.

And it's important to recognize that we can't diagnose a team's psychological weaknesses by watching one game. There are far too many variables involved in football to make those kinds of assumptions.

Still, unexpected losses give us a reason to think more seriously about the relationship between athletic ability, pressure, leadership, and team culture.

I've always found it interesting that we spend so much time trying to identify the most talented athletes and teams, but considerably less time discussing whether they're psychologically prepared for everything that comes with being successful.

Because success creates its own challenges.

And if there's one thing football reminds us every season, it's that having the better roster doesn't guarantee you're going to have the better Saturday.

The part I'll be watching isn't just which teams bounce back in the rankings.

It's how they respond after discovering they're not quite as untouchable as everyone thought.

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**About the Author**

Dr. Brandy Runyan holds a PhD in Sport Leadership and is the founder of Black Diamond Sports & Entertainment Group, LLC. She has worked in athlete management and professional football representation for nearly two decades. Her work includes athlete development, sport leadership, and research interests in mental resilience and the psychological demands of elite athletic competition. She is also the creator of The Mind Lab, an athlete development program focused on mental resilience and performance.